warez and IRC is where I started. There used to be IRC channels you could go to and get links to warez sites for stuff or simply share directly via IRC downloading. The people who were in college/university with T1 lines were the kings of that stuff at the time as everyone else was lucky if they were even on a 56k dial-up connection. I pretty much pirated almost every Dreamcast game via IRC OR via forums where people would burn stuff to a disc for you and then physically mail the discs to your house. I had a buddy that was in college half way across the country that would do this. download a bunch of stuff via his T1 line, burn the stuff to a bunch of CD-Rs and then mail them to my house, I remember that's how I got Windows 2000.